The children were thrilled by the hubbub. I proposed that we burn down the house and move. But my husband wanted to try a less drastic solution first, and a visit to the hardware store combined with some peanut butter remedied the situation forthwith. It was all over in one sense. And yet, none of us are isolated beings—neither we ourselves nor the mice we meet along the way. 

I was affronted by an encounter with wildlife in my city house, but in fact, this episode is but a blip in the longer story of the coexistence of mice and men (and women, to be sure). We’ve all been city-dwellers for millennia now, regularly living in close quarters even if most people over 10 would prefer not to think about that fact. The city has been good to us, and yet it exacts its price. My furry friend and I are fellow travelers in more ways than one.  

Plagues and Pizzerias

A city mouse once came to visit a country mouse. So opens one of the most famous of Aesop’s Fables. Disappointed by the decidedly unimpressive dinner that the country mouse serves, the city mouse invites his friend to come to a fancy banquet at his place instead. The food there proves amazing, utterly unlike anything the country mouse has ever experienced before. But then the cats show up, and the mice barely make it out alive.  

The moral of the story is to be content with little, as the country mouse concludes at the end. Sure, the city mouse has much better food than the country mouse. But the city mouse also has to live with constant danger, with harrowing threats to life and limb. There are, it seems, tradeoffs to moving to the big city; the benefits come at a potentially high cost. And yet, whenever we casually reference this story, which has entered English idiom, we forget a crucial historical fact: There was a time when the city mouse didn’t exist. 

Rodents like mice and rats have become a commensal species relatively recently, historian Kyle Harper remarks in his book Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Historians, of course, pay attention to people. But perhaps now that we’ve experienced a pandemic in recent memory, we shouldn’t too easily forget the non-human agents of historical change, the ones who wreak havoc on man-made empires through the dissemination of deadly pathogens. There are four categories of parasites that can get us sick: helminths (fancy word for worms, who are definitely not fancy), protozoa, bacteria, and viruses. SARS-CoV-2 (aka Covid-19) is a virus. Malaria, one of the top killers in all human history, is caused by protozoa, whereas the Bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium. This brings us to another important point: collaboration is key to success, and not only for people.

Many of these parasites, invisible to the naked eye, hitch a ride on other, larger carriers—protozoa on mosquitoes, ticks on deer and moose, and of course, fleas on rats. Which brings us right back to those country rats and mice, who historically did not reach the same conclusion as Aesop’s protagonist, who was so content to go back home and never return to the city. Instead, once historical rodents discovered cities, they could never go back. The real-life country mouse that visits a city, in other words, tends to stay in the city. Its country-dwelling cousins can stay where they are, and plenty of them do, if they’ve never experienced the alternative. But the city mouse is here to stay. 

Perhaps mice are not very different in this regard from humans, whose migration patterns also tend to go only one way. And that is precisely the point in the original fable. While using animals as protagonists, after all, Aesop’s fables reflected on human socio-cultural developments. It’s just that in this particular case, perhaps even more than in some others, humans and animals are remarkably alike. Once we discover cities, with their rich culture, restaurants, coffeeshops, and all the other trappings of civilization, we too become converts to the city life, expressly naming those bakeries and pizzerias as one of our motivating reasons—and turning a blind eye to the cat-sized rats that patrol the alleyways behind our favorite eateries. 

In fact, Harper offers a heartening tale about one of the ways the mouse’s larger cousin, the country rat, first discovered cities. He places responsibility with the Romans, whose mobility across vast swaths of land and sea in ancient Eurasia brought along certain species of rats from their native Asia to Rome and other cities as an unintended memento of their travels and works of conquest. (A worthy updated answer to the question: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”) The results have been, of course, nothing short of devastating. Harper reminds: “Although many a textbook still claims that the Black Death carried off a third of the continent, in reality, the best estimates are closer to half.”

Patriotic Rodents

It appears that our commensality with rats and mice is not benefiting us, humans. And yet, here we are, still city dwellers, right along with the rats and mice we ignore or, sometimes, accidentally ingest unawares. Because, as it turns out, we have the same tastes—culinarily speaking. In the film Ratatouille, a highly refined Parisian city rat turns his love of complex tastes into a career as a chef. Makes sense—and data shows, furthermore, that rats, like people, love their local cuisine best. But city rats are not just exquisite gourmands with a remarkably sophisticated palate—they, like people, adapt to their city and become a part of it. 

A report on New York City rats’ eating preferences used citation reports of NYC eateries to make some conclusions on “exactly where man and rodent break bread.” Leading the pack was American food. Out of the cited restaurants, “232 served American cuisine, 153 of them were Chinese-based, 71 served Japanese and 65 were Latin. Pizza spots were also near the top of the list, with 60 different restaurants showing evidence of rats. In the middle of the pack were Spanish and Thai restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops and delicatessens. Bringing up the rear were Kosher and Tex-Mex, which only had 8 eateries cited for rats.” 

New York City rats, in other words, are unabashedly American patriots down to their pizza-loving core. And while NYC is now really trying to crack down on its murine populace, the official Rat Czar, Kathleen Corradi, has her work cut out for her, with “several million furry problems to eliminate and no direct staff.” At least, it appears that the new requirement for the human city-dwellers to put their trash in containers, instead of setting it out in bags directly on the curb, has been fairly successful so far in reducing rat sightings. But will the rats ever fully move out? I expect that the success of the war on rats will, at some point, plateau. Perhaps the city rats will have to adjust their tastes in the meantime, settling for what’s available rather than living the high life of selecting their preferred takeout each night. 

And yet, there’s another option: City mice (and rats) could become country mice yet again. And the same goes for city people, who bear the burden of skyrocketing rent costs in New York City and some other large cities, instead of moving somewhere where the cost of living would be significantly more affordable. Wendell Berry has spent his entire writing career, now extending over six decades, bemoaning this pull of the city from the countryside time and again in his nonfiction and fiction. It doesn’t have to be this way, he repeatedly reminds. City life is the one we choose for ourselves, and all for what? For that stressful rat race of a life that Aesop’s original country mouse sensibly saw for what it was—not worth the constant danger and stress. 

But here’s the paradox: Somehow, without even realizing that it happened, we’re all city mice now, as far as the availability of luxuries and amenities in our lives goes. Yes, there are very traditional Old Order Amish who farm on the outskirts of my small Ohio town—these are the very people whom Berry repeatedly brings up in his nonfiction and fiction as examples of choosing the right priorities, treasuring the simpler life, and avoiding the worst of modernity. And yet, they drive their horse and buggy to the local Aldi, where I show up in my typical mom minivan. As we both stock up on produce and more, the contents of their shopping carts at times appear indistinguishable from mine, minus the frozen pizza. Uncanny. 

Sure, cities have enthralled humans and pests alike with their glamorous promises and offerings for millennia, and yet they also encourage our covetousness and often don’t deliver on the promise of happiness anyway. But then, idealizing the “trad” life is likewise pointless in this age of ubiquitous small luxuries, readily available to all, including my rural Amish neighbors. At least, I can say, after living much of our early lives in larger cities, both my husband and I have found it a comfort and delight to spend over a decade in a small town in Georgia, and now to call a small town in Ohio our home. Turns out that finding happiness by reverse migration—from city mice back to country-adjacent mice—is not just the stuff of Hallmark channel romances.

The End of the Line

At the zoo, the same week as Mousegate, we took a leisurely stroll through the Australia section, where my children were delighted to see a caged kookaburra. In his beak was a mouse, whole and readily recognizable, its long tail hanging limp to one side. For a few minutes, the bird primly sat on its perch, ignoring the onlookers. And then, shaking his head back in one abrupt swoop … reader, he ate it. 

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No.

Maybe that’s fair. Ancient Greek philosophy, history, or literature are no longer standard fare at most public schools in America. But there is one type of schooling where, at least sometimes, they are still taught: Classical schools. As it happens, the Classical approach to education has found itself in recent years in the crosshairs of culture wars. 

How did we get here? Can there really be burning controversy around learning a dead language, or reading some dead poets with frog choruses? As someone with a PhD in Classics (of the Greco-Roman variety), but who also is a Classical homeschooling parent, I have found the heated conversations around the topic remarkably confused and confusing. 

In an excellent recent article in the New Yorker, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?,” journalist Emma Green provides what may be the best (and most balanced) survey of the Classical education movement that I have seen from an outsider to it all. In what follows, I would like to begin with an overview of Green’s arguments and then offer my own response as an insider of sorts—as a homeschooling parent who has been involved for many years in a Classical education co-op and as someone who still uses methods of Classical education in homeschooling children and holds a PhD in Classics. 

Historians like to complicate things, and here I would like to complicate the picture of Classical education a bit. While some public faces of the Classical education movement, including conservative politicians, do see it through the lens of culture wars, the reality looks different for the majority of ordinary families—like my own. Try as some might to see every act as political, sometimes it’s about the oikos, not the polis.

Lost Tools of Learning

For some time now, Green has been interested in the nexus of conservative politics and education. Last spring, for instance, she wrote an in-depth profile of Hillsdale College. Turning her attention to Classical schools may seem a logical next step—since they are the main pipeline of students who end up at schools like Hillsdale. Many of them, indeed, were either educated in Classical Christian schools or were Classical homeschoolers. 

Green begins her piece by setting up the contrast between Classical education and mainstream public education. Classical education places an emphasis on phonics rather than sight words when teaching kids to read. It requires much rote memorization of facts in an age where most educators oppose the idea. Last but not least, Classical education privileges reading Great Books as opposed to modern “quick lit” or graphic novels and the like. 

However, the classical view of education involves more than just what is learned and how it is learned. There is an emphasis, in the process, on moral formation—the why piece of education, which is too often lacking in modern public education. The education of the whole person in the virtues is essential, and that’s where many in the movement eagerly cite Dorothy Sayers’ famous 1947 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It seemed to Sayers that her society had lost the hunger for learning, and she attributed this lack of appreciation for the true, beautiful, and good to the inadequacies of modern education. Dismissing recent educational innovations, she instead talked up the Medieval Trivium, with its emphasis on the building blocks of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. 

Green is impressed by Sayers’ argument. Her curricular approach seems very sound. Why then would people like author Diane Ravitch wield the charge that “Classical charters have become weapons of the Right”? Green sees two related problems. First, the emphasis on moral formation and civics—along with the use of mostly white male authors in the curriculum—sets up Classical education for conservative takeover. Or, at least, it seems to be an attractive alternative to the “woke” public school education. The politicians on the right whom Green quotes indeed say as much.

Second, the idea of pursuing goodness, truth, and beauty sounds grand in theory, but not everyone defines these terms the same way. Green is left wondering: how can the Classical education movement grow without embracing a pluralistic definition of these values? Some decry wokeness in response to this very question, while others, like Jessica Hooten Wilson, note that the task is one merely of restoring the voices who had always been a part of the movement anyway. Still, the question remains: can the movement be inclusive of students who are not white and Christian, if Doug Wilson is one of the movement’s spokespeople? This is a good question, and Green is not the only one asking. When she interviewed Susan Wise Bauer, a writer and teacher widely respected in the Classical education circles, the latter noted: if she and Wilson were having a conversation about Classical education, perhaps the only thing they would agree on is the importance of teaching grammar. (I guess this means she’s opting out of “No Quarter November.”)

Green has done her homework, and yet, the Classical education movement is even more diverse than perhaps she realizes. I contend that the key to seeing Classical education flourishing between the left and the right is to examine Classical homeschooling.

Doing Homer at Home

I first stumbled into the world of Classical education completely by accident. In the summer of 2012, I was trying to figure out the homeschooling approach for the following year for my then nearly seven-year-old, when a homeschooling colleague at the secular state university where we were both teaching at the time told me about a Classical Conversations homeschooling co-op that was meeting three minutes from my then home in rural Georgia. I had never heard of Classical education as a philosophy, nor had I heard of Classical Conversations. I did, however, hold a PhD in Classics and had been planning to teach my child Latin and Greek at some point. And I was firmly committed to homeschooling.

In retrospect, my complaints against American public schools bore a remarkable resemblance to Sayers’s own jeremiad against mid-twentieth-century British education. She phrased her concerns much better than I could, but like me, she was a trained Classicist, and studying dead languages was what she loved best—with the possible exception of learning languages that weren’t quite so dead. She did, after all, master Renaissance Italian just to be able to read and translate Dante.

Alas, Classical Conversations turned out to be a different sort of Classical schooling than I expected. I suspect Sayers too would have been disappointed. CC involved no Greek, only minimal Latin until middle school (and then taught poorly out of an appalling textbook first published in 1938), and no Greco-Roman Classics until high school. There were also factual errors in some of the “memory work” that kids were supposed to memorize at the grammar stage of the program. The history curriculum peppily referred to the Civil War as “the war between the states.” And then there was the logic curriculum used in middle school, crafted by an illogical guy who contradicted himself regularly—his name was Doug Wilson, and I had never heard of him before my child had to suffer through his logic textbook, which we promptly took out with the mixed paper recyclables at the end of the year. Oh, how I miss 2015, when one could be a conservative evangelical and not be familiar with Doug Wilson. 

Still, for all its flaws, Classical Conversations proved mostly good for my oldest, who attended it for six years, and for my middle son, who thoroughly enjoyed his one year with it. The emphasis on memorization at the elementary school level proved wonderfully useful for such subjects as math and geography. In early middle school, my oldest and his classmates were able to draw both a map of the US and the world on a massive blank sheet of paper from memory. That was pretty impressive, to say the least. Most importantly, some of the moms I met in CC are still friends who are dear to me, even as our oldest kids have now graduated high school. 

As I think back, the reason that we stuck it out with CC for six years had nothing to do with the curriculum, which was a mixed bag. Rather, our decision to stay had everything to do with friendships and with location. It was a community that met close to my home, and it was a community that really bonded as a community of friends with diverse political and theological views, but with a shared commitment to teaching our children together. When that meeting site closed and the nearest chapter was thirty minutes away, we were done with CC. 

Longing for Beauty

We were not, however, done with Classical education. Most of the truly Classical content that my kids have learned has always been, after all, at home. The homeschooling method my family uses these days, as we homeschool our younger two kids, is closest to unschooling. Still, our unschooling has a Classical flavor of the sort that Sayers would approve—even if perhaps the idea of a child standing on his head while trying to solve a math problem would have appalled her as much as it might appall anyone who has never homeschooled an energetic boy. Or maybe Sayers would have just joined him herself. She definitely had enough spunk.

Speaking of spunk, my eight-year-old is currently in his second year of koine Greek. He asked if he could start Latin next year. Who am I to deny such a request? He is also a walking encyclopedia of information on US and world history—largely because of his own reading. He always had a great memory, but the Classical emphasis on memory training—the process of having to memorize facts, poems, speeches—seems to have strengthened his memory further. Last but not least, we read a lot of Great Books, both as family read-alouds and also individually—books that the eight-year-old reads to himself. We are deliberately picky about reading materials for all ages. In particular, while modern bookstores too often peddle subpar offerings to children, I am firmly convinced that children’s books should be beautiful. 

It is this quest for beauty in everything we read, consume, and analyze that drives the selection of books and topics we study. It is a particularly powerful instinct for my youngest, who recently turned five, and is currently in the throes of learning to read. She loves writing—the beauty of crafting letters painstakingly, one at a time. Words to her are beautiful pictures to decorate. A graceful dancer and an enthusiastic singer, she draws rather than writes the names of friends, family members, and her doll. 

This longing for beauty in the every day, however, brings us back full circle to the questions Green had set out to investigate in her research on Classical schools. Is this kind of education inherently political? Perhaps it is, as the views of some political leaders who have expressed support for the movement declare. Outside the realm of education, I have previously written about the far right’s obsession with Socrates. And the hijacking of the Greco-Roman Classics for various political aims, including by the Third Reich, is well documented. But these are not people in my home. Should the quest for beauty in the every day, including in education, be coded “left” or “right”? This sounds utterly absurd, and nowhere is the absurdity as clear as in the highly libertarian environment of schooling at home.

The real question may be: is this desire for beauty, goodness, and truth political for me and my family? Is it political for every homeschooling family that opts for a similar approach? This is a more difficult question to answer. I never thought, when I was first attracted to the study of the ancient world as a (then) secular Jewish high school sophomore, that signing up for Latin class was a political statement. I simply loved the beauty of intellectual puzzles. Over a quarter century later, I still do. 

And so, searching for political motives in Classical schooling is complicated, especially so among Classical homeschoolers. While none of us exist in a vacuum, it is more difficult to peg individuals into any specific category. Besides, the quest for human flourishing, including the intellectual flourishing of children and families, should not be a partisan affair.

The story of Classical homeschoolers, more than anything, is a story of an incredible diversity of motivations, transcending the predictably facile political categories. Classical homeschooling, in other words, dwells between the right and the left, because the love of life-long learning and the idea that this kind of intellectual curiosity is part of what makes us truly human is not a partisan value. Indeed, as I wrote six years ago, the study of Latin has been growing faster among homeschoolers than any other segment of the population. These Latin-studying homeschoolers are remarkably diverse politically and religiously. I noted at the time that “lest you think that Classical education is entirely a Christian homeschooling phenomenon, Wiccans are able to claim it as their own thanks to Martianus Capella, the Late Antique pagan writer who first proposed the idea of the Seven Liberal Arts.” Green’s own experience in visiting an immigrant and POC-serving Classical charter school that is thriving in South Bronx underscores the point.

In some ways, of course, everything any of us do is political. By choosing to homeschool, we already made a possibly unintentional political decision: the local public school is funded based on the number of children enrolled. No less political, perhaps, is the decision to teach my children Latin and Greek. What else could they be learning instead? This has become a political question, a real hot-button issue. 

But as a homeschooling parent, grounded in my own family’s day-to-day life, it is not a question for which I have time. I’m too busy reading Homer with my eight-year-old.

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Jeremiads on the above trends abound, and so do recommendations for solutions. It may be more productive, though, to consider an alternate future that is possible, based on two examples of institutions where the humanities have been flourishing in Higher Ed’s apocalyptic age: the conservative Christian colleges Hillsdale and Grove City. Both have a reputation as bastions of conservative politics. A closer look reveals that both share a more interesting commonality, in this age when the humanities in secular institutions are floundering, stripped of all semblance of traditional virtue. 

The remarkably high numbers of students majoring in the humanities and the liberal arts at Hillsdale College and Grove City College, by contrast, offer an idea that deserves our attention. The four most popular majors at Hillsdale are: Economics (12%), History (12%), English (9%), and Political Science (7%). And while Grove City College emphasizes its engineering and pre-med programs as well, Literature is still its third most popular major (5% of graduates). Both colleges, furthermore, continue to emphasize the value of the humanities in their general education curriculum, and the size of their tenure-track and tenured humanities faculty body reflects this value.

Let us consider this provocation: what if the future of the humanities lies in Christian colleges—and colleges I would term Christian-adjacent in their mission, like St. John’s College? And what if this means recognizing something distinctly premodern and, most importantly, transcendent about the value of the humanities—their role in shaping human souls and character to produce people and citizens who are not only more ethical and devoted citizens in a democracy, but are also more fulfilled, joyful, and loving? Such valuing of the humanities cannot happen at state universities, divorced as their missions are from matters of the transcendent, the care of souls. But in Christian colleges, this can and should be the mission.

In a blog post in April 2023, I asked: What do we learn if we calculate ratios of faculty per student in various humanities disciplines at different universities? What institution has the highest ratio of Classics faculty per student? When I polled friends anecdotally, they largely assumed that the PhD-granting Ivies would have the highest ratio, but that is not, in fact, the case. Harvard employs one Classicist per 376 students (19 full-time Classics faculty for 7,153 undergraduate students). My PhD alma mater, Princeton, had one Classicist per 280 students (at the time, 19 Classics faculty for 5,321 undergraduates). By contrast, Hillsdale has one Classicist per 216 students (1,515 students and seven Classicists). 

Hillsdale’s History Department has a similarly impressive ratio: one historian per 80 students (19 faculty for 1,515 undergraduates). Indeed, the largest Ivy League History Department—Yale, with its 68 faculty for 6,536 students—has a ratio of one historian per 96 students. 

Meanwhile at Grove City College, a student body less than half the size of Harvard’s has twice as many English majors. One might counter: this is a comparison of apples and oranges—of institutions like Harvard that simply have many more other degree programs and of those like Hillsdale, which are primarily liberal arts colleges. And yet, I would respond, James Patterson’s concerns in “The Economy of Prestige” show patently the difficulties in which so many Christian institutions find themselves. In this age of enrollment declines, including at small Christian colleges, both Hillsdale and Grove City College are doing quite well overall, unlike their many counterparts, secular or Christian, who have experienced severe enrollment declines and have been slashing the humanities in response.

So, what do these numbers reveal? 

The story is two-fold. First, students do vote with their feet, and if offered the chance to partake in a robust general education curriculum that is rooted in the humanities, many rejoice in the opportunity. As Emma Green’s New Yorker profile of Hillsdale College showed last spring, record numbers of students are involved, for instance, in music—even if they are not majoring in it. 

A second contributing factor is the institutional investment in the humanities at some Christian colleges, which have traditionally prioritized character formation in the virtues as an integral part of college education. Because, as the cliché goes, the humanities teach us what makes us human, Christian colleges have found this mission particularly close to their theological hearts. Spiritual formation, after all, is connected to character formation. We are what we read, what we think, what we study. The study of Great Books, history, art, and music forms us to love the good, the true, and the beautiful. The liberals arts have earthly significance and joy, but are also filled with transcendent revelations. 

Furthermore, in this age of AI, a robust theology of personhood is essential for understanding the beauty of authentic humanity. AI can do many things more quickly, and seemingly better, than we, feeble creatures of dust that we are. It can learn languages, compose basic essays, play chess at world championship level (or, really, any level ordained), write poetry, create art, and even deliver a sermon.

The appreciation of the humanities requires, in other words, an appreciation for humans and for distinctly human creativity as valuable, significant, and important for a life of flourishing in the here and now. This makes the humanities both practical and transcendent. After all, forming character as a deliberate part of college education will result in graduates who are better people, ones imbued with the virtues that too often are lacking. As philosopher and virtue ethicist Christian Miller has argued, there is a genuine “character gap” among the general population today. People believe that they are better than they really are, which means that they have little interest in growth in the virtues.

And so, it is no coincidence that, in response to the AI revolution, colleges like Grove City have a taskforce considering the incorporation of monastic practices into the curriculum. Historian Molly Worthen outlined this strategy a few months ago in her exhortation that “universities should be more like monasteries.” By banning smartphones, or presenting the opportunity for students to take a vow of silence for a period during the semester, these institutions hope to train minds along with souls, recognizing that human beings are not machines. 

To be fair, any college or university—secular just as much as Christian—could, in theory, see the value of the humanities in educating beings who are not just mortal bodies but are also immortal souls. And any university could likewise, in theory, prioritize the formation of character, and therefore emphasize filling students’ minds with things that are good, true, and beautiful as part of the mission. I contend, however, that there is a worldview difference involved that transcends the usual red herring of woke politics. Secular state universities, in particular, are increasingly run based on utilitarian principles, focused on getting students into paying jobs but without much attention to job satisfaction. The result is an industrial-treadmill-style approach to the education of persons. If the worth of a degree or a person is entirely predicated on the money they can earn, the virtues seem irrelevant—and the humanities right along with them. Why bother with monastic practices if one has the narrow goal of preparing the student for a lucrative career in accounting?

Christian colleges could be the best place for the humanities to thrive—but only if these colleges will openly and consciously embrace this mission. If they do, the examples of Hillsdale and Grove City suggest that they may find themselves solving their overall enrollment crisis too, all while serving the American democracy and pointing students to genuine flourishing in an ever-changing and increasingly corrupt world. 

In his much grimmer take on the future of Christian colleges, James Patterson divides American higher education institutions into two categories: “struggling mission-driven or formerly mission-driven colleges … and high prestige, secular colleges and universities.” I agree that the vast majority, indeed, fall into these categories, but my suggestions here, based on two mission-driven colleges that are flourishing, is that there is yet a third option. In the case of Grove City, the flourishing of the humanities alongside an engineering program reminds us that a strong humanities focus in the general education curriculum can coexist and flourish alongside the kind of professional training that so many colleges are eager to add. 

In this age of AI scandals and plagiarism-prone college presidents, we need colleges that will teach students to be full persons—priceless image-bearers whose souls, just as much as minds and bodies and earning potentials, matter. The humanities are integral to this goal, and Christian colleges and others like them, with a mission dedicated to forming whole persons, are the best poised for the task.

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